Scotland

The Events – Traverse Theatre

There’s something quietly disarming about walking into the Traverse and finding the choir already in place. No theatrical reveal, just a community gathered on stage, singing, moving joyously, and dispensing hot drinks to the audience. Behind them, in a broad horseshoe, columns of stacked chairs rise like an improvised colonnade, orderly, architectural, faintly ecclesiastical. Later, those same chairs are winched into the roof, clattering against one another in a moment of metallic chaos, a striking image of rupture of ‘the event’ that lingers long after it settles.

David Greig’s The Events, first staged in 2013 and winner of a Fringe First that year, returns here as a welcome re-emergence of a modern classic. Its revival demonstrates that it has lost none of its edge. If anything, the intervening years have made it feel more sharply attuned to the anxieties of the present moment.

The premise is simple but loaded. Claire, a priest and choir leader, survives a mass shooting and becomes consumed by the need to understand why. The Boy who carried out the act is encountered in shifting guises, and the community choir, stands as both witness and embodiment of society itself.

Here, the choir is no decorative flourish. Singing largely a cappella and unamplified, they create a warm, collective sound that contrasts sharply with the two principal characters, whose voices are mic’d and occasionally distorted. The effect is subtle but telling, the community remains human and grounded, the individual fractures under pressure. Having sung in choirs for years, I couldn’t help but feel that sense of shared breath and unity, and it throws the isolation of the angry young man into even sharper relief.

At the centre of it all are Claire Lamont as Claire and Sam Stopford in a tour-de-force performance that goes far beyond a single role. Stopford does not simply play the Boy, he inhabits a succession of characters, the father, a school friend, a psychologist, the extremist leader, fragments of society itself, yet in each guise there is an echo of the Boy. Wherever Claire turns, she seems to encounter him again, refracted through different social masks. It is a clever theatrical device, externalising her fixation and rerouting it through the wider world. Stopford handles these rapid shifts with precision and nuance, creating distinct personalities while maintaining a subtle through-line that keeps the psychological tension taut. Lamont, meanwhile, balances intellectual rigour with emotional exposure, charting Claire’s spiralling need for explanation with clarity and depth. Together they carry the philosophical weight of the text while keeping it rooted in lived experience.

Greig is careful not to offer easy answers. The Boy’s rage resists tidy diagnosis. Immigration, identity, alienation, the play circles these faultlines without pinning them down. Claire’s relentless why becomes both engine and burden. The question hangs there, immovable, and the refusal to resolve it is part of the point.

Equally disturbing is Greig’s portrayal of the extremist leader who hovers behind events. There is no pantomime villainy here, none of the lazy shorthand so often deployed elsewhere. Instead, he is calm, rational, domestically recognisable, a father concerned for his daughter, a man anxious about everyday trivialities. By stripping away caricature, Greig forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that destructive ideologies are inhabited by people who see themselves as coherent and justified.

In one of the play’s sharper exchanges, the leader turns his critique on Claire, and by extension, on liberal sensibilities. He suggests that what is often celebrated as multicultural openness can shade into something more self-serving, an enjoyment of difference so long as the underlying structures of control remain intact. It’s a bracing challenge, and the play is stronger for allowing it to stand without editorialising.

Technically, this production is assured. The lighting is controlled and expressive without fuss, and the sound design, particularly the interplay between distorted amplification and natural choral tone, is deft. Visually, the choreography of those chairs, whether stacked in disciplined formation or jangling mid-air, provides a simple but potent theatrical metaphor.

If there is a reservation, it lies in pacing. At times the text feels overly dense, circling its arguments with more words than necessary, and the evening threatens to lose momentum. A little tightening might sharpen its impact.

But even when it drifts, The Events remains thoughtful and ambitious. More than a decade on from its debut, it feels less like a period piece and more like a warning that was never fully heeded. It asks difficult questions about community, responsibility and the limits of understanding, and resists the comfort of simple answers. For anyone who has experienced the peculiar grace of standing inside the unity of a choir’s shared sound, the discord and alienation at the heart of this play resonates all the more keenly

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 27^th February 2026

North West End UK Rating: